Story of a Choctaw POW comes to light after 300 years

Iti
Fabvssa

This month, Iti Fabvssa
presents an incredible and yet heart-wrenching story of two Native
American men who were captured by enemies in what is now the
American Southeast and taken to Europe as prisoners of war. For 300
years, their story was unknown, until recently when researchers
managed to reconstruct it from bits and pieces found in original
documents from the American Colonies and Europe. Available
information suggests that one of these two POWs was probably a
Choctaw man. What is presented below is a synopsis of the recently
published account (Sullivan 2012), combined with insights from the
"Choctaw" side of the frontier.

From a Choctaw
perspective, the story would begin with a boy born somewhere in the
Choctaw homeland in 1694 or 1695. He was the son of a chief and
part of a powerful family. His birth name is unknown, but as a
young man, he was given the name Okchalincha, which could be
translated as "Brought to Life." Growing up, he probably heard
stories handed down from the days of his
great-great-great-greatgrandparents about a Spanish army (lead by
Hernando Desoto), entering the area and fighting with Tribal
communities. These stories might have seemed almost unreal when
Okchalincha was a young boy, because for 130 years since the
Spanish left, few or no Europeans entered the Choctaw homeland.
Only the deadly diseases they brought continued to rage through the
area.

However, when Okchalincha
was around 5 years old, a different group of Europeans, the French
suddenly arrived on the Gulf Coast, very near Choctaw country. They
soon set up a permanent settlement on Mobile Bay. An alliance was
created between the Choctaw and the French. The French supplied the
Choctaw with guns, metal, and cloth, while the Choctaw provided
food, hides, and military protection for the small French
colony.

Although an international
alliance with France brought benefits to the Choctaw people, it
also involved Choctaw communities in France's global power struggle
with England. In hopes of weakening France's Native allies, English
colonists in Carolina armed warriors from English-allied Tribes
with guns and began paying them for prisoners that they could
capture from other Tribes.

By around 1700, Chickasaw
slaving raids, sponsored by the English had resulted in 500 Choctaw
women and children taken as slaves, 1,800 Choctaw men, women, and
children killed, and 800 Chickasaw warriors killed (Iberville
1981:172 [1702]). The inhumanity of the English slave trade was
ultimately one contributing factor in the Yamasee War of 1715, in
which Muscogee Tribes attacked the Carolina Colony and brought it
to its knees, before the Cherokee entered the war and helped to
save the colonists.

Okchalincha grew up in
this environment. No doubt, from an early age, concepts of bravery
and self-sacrifice to protect the community were instilled in him.
As a young man, he must have distinguished himself in fighting for
his community, and so was tattooed as a warrior, from head to toe.
Through circumstances that we do not know, this warrior was later
captured by an enemy force, taken hundreds of miles on foot to the
Carolina Colony, and sold as a slave to John Pight.

According to surviving
records, Pight was one of the most viscous English slave traders,
and was effectively banned from the colony because of the role that
his abuses of Native people played in starting the Yamasee War.
When he sailed for England in 1719, he took two Native American men
with him, Okchalincha and a man named Tvstvnvke who was probably
from one of the Muscogee Tribes.

People living in Europe
during this time had a curiosity about Native Americans. Pight
capitalized on this interest and the sensation caused by the
spectacular dark-blue tattoos that covered the bodies of his two
captives. Pight made up costumes for Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke and
concocted sensational stories about their past and his own. He
began charging fees for Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke to appear as
spectacles at theaters and in circuses around London. Perhaps most
humiliatingly, Pight brought paying customers to the men's living
quarters, to observe their tattoos and inspect them like works of
art in a gallery, as they stood still and stone-faced. Pight even
once had them perform a war dance at a London woodwind concert.
While the sites, settings, and cultural juxtapositions must have
sometimes been pretty interesting, Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke were
prisoners of war, being forced to act against their will.

Neither of the Native men
spoke English; Pike was the only person in their lives that they
could communicate with, apparently through the Mobilian trade
jargon. Pike, jealous of profits and not wanting to lose control
over the men, did his best to keep them from interacting with other
people. Nevertheless, the two became quite popular in London. They
were entertained by nobility, given tours of London landmarks, and
several times invited to an audience with King George I.

After about six months,
the profitability of these spectacles started to wane for Pight. He
took Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke to Paris against their will, where
he hired them out as mascots for the unpopular American Company.
Thereafter, the three disappear from the historical record, but
reappear in present day Germany in 1722.

Eventually, Pight
got tired of touring, and boarded the two men in Dresden,
attempting to sell them as curiosities to King Augustus. This
situation allowed them to interact more with the local people. From
the writings of these people, we start to see a bit of the human
side of the two men. We learn that Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke wanted
to return to their homelands, that they thought European clothing
was silly, that they liked European beds and enjoyed smoking. We
learn that they had scars on their bodies from battle wounds. The
two were noteworthy among Europeans for their honesty. They had an
excellent sense of direction, and rarely got lost, even in the
streets of towns unfamiliar to them. We also learn that Tvstvnvke
was learning to paint, depicting the cities that they traveled
through. Okchalincha had a reserved personality, and Tvstvnvke
liked to make him laugh. The Europeans who were interacting with
these two men, seem to have respected them. Some expressed regret
that they had come under Pight's control.

Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke
had a surprisingly broad influence in Europe. They are mentioned in
The Half-Pay Officer, an English comedy and in several period
satires. They were the background for a character in the French
play Arlequin Sauvage, and their names found their way into a
Masonic ritual. Multiple paintings and statues of them were
commissioned by wealthy Europeans. One image of Okchalincha (Fig.
1) survives.

Fig. 1: The lone surviving image of
Okchalincha.

In 1723, Pight sold
Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke to King Augustus. By this point, they had
started to learn the German language. In Pight's absence, they
finally had an opportunity to freely interact with other people,
and they made friends with some of the Protestant citizens of the
town. Tragically, much like the Choctaw's alliance with France,
this friendship pulled the two men into an international struggle
between Protestantism and Catholicism. Following the encouragement
of their new friends, Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke were baptized into
the Protestant faith as Friedrich Christian and August Christian.
This was done without the King's permission. In punishment, he
decided to gift them to the Czarina of Russia, moving them to an
area where they knew absolutely no one.

Okchalincha and Tvstvnvke
disappear from the known historical record in October 1724 riding
in a carriage, ultimately headed for Russia. Tears were in their
eyes as they left their friends and headed for an area then
experiencing a plague epidemic. Okchalincha was 29 years old.

In their lifetimes,
Okchalincha's family members never found out what happened to him,
heard the fantastic and sad story of his years touring Europe, or
knew that years after his capture, he was still out there alive and
wanting to come home. It is hoped that by telling his story to the
Choctaw people, even 300 years later, some small measure of closure
is provided and some due respect is given to Okchalincha for the
difficult and also incredible path that he traveled.

Works Cited:
Sullivan, John Sullivan, 2012 The Princes: A Reconstruction. The
Paris Review. Spring 35-88.

This article and others came from the
Choctaw Nation Biskinik. To see more history please refer to the
following sites.